[Raspberry Pi] What is your use case for your RaspPi

3B+ with Ubuntu Mate to watch ripped DVD’s on a USB drive. Haven’t set up any kind of media server because they are just one use files. Watch then delete.

Try right-clicking the volume applet in the upper right corner of Raspbian. That’s where I found a selector between HDMI and analog audio, @mowest

We are running LibreELEC with Kody, and there is a selector in there for HDMI. We discovered the problem why we were not getting any sound through the HDMI cable to the TV. My son had hooked everything up, and I didn’t think to check the connections that he made. He is used to always using a converter to plug a RPi into a VGA monitor. He had a converter in between the RPi and the TV. Once he plugged on HDMI cable between the RPi and the TV everything worked as expected. Thanks for all of the tips though. Lesson learned, double check your connections.

1 Like

thinking about a pi 4 for Kodi to replace roku.

Never had a Pi but I already thought about it to replace the 2012 mac mini under the TV. I use Kodi and have started to dabble with some 4k movies. Would the Pi4 be strong enough for those ?

Still curious about Pi as a low-cost desktop but even more curious about a Pi cluster and what kind of performance might be available from that… I wonder if hooking-up mulitiple Pis might be able to get deeper or faster chess analysis for example. (From what I’ve understood the open source Stockfish chess engine is performing very favourably against proprietary solutions.)

I bought a model 2 B years ago and have done several projects with it but none that ever amounted to anything meaningful. I mostly attribute this to most of these efforts just being done to learn about then and not really needing to run them ongoing and also using a proper server for other things that ran ok on a pi but not great. Ryan’s video about Pi-hole made me take another look and I’m happy to say that it runs great and is a useful thing that I plan on using and keeping around.

2 Likes

I read an opinion here which says Raspberry have

binary blobs used by the GPU to both start the CPU and run its own ThreadX OS (bootcode.bin and start.elf)

The next part left me most concerned:

We cannot know everything the GPU is doing, but we do know some things that it is in charge of. The most relevant one for this discussion is that ThreadX monitors for undervoltage, which is a widespread issue as we will see next, and will underclock the CPU to prevent instructions failing and the CPU to hang, which results in people’s devices running at 600MHz instead of 1400MHz in the best case. This throttling starts happening at 4.65V and can also be triggered by temperature. Linux and its frequency governor still thinks that is happily running at full speed.

This is only what we can see. Because the main OS is closed source we have not way of knowing what else it is doing or is capable of doing which will always be a concern for privacy aware individuals.

Is this all true?

Right now, just pi-hole.

However, I’d like to get a pi4 and try Kodi as a possible replacement for Roku. Roku is moving to voice search and I’ll not have that in my house.

Had a RetroPi for a while and that was fun. Now that I have a handful of those “Classic” mini-consoles that’s not as useful. Kind of in-between Pi projects at the moment. Thought about doing a pi-hole, or maybe a homemade NAS. Free time is the limiting factor, as always.

Mine has basically been degraded to “test device” status, since I got my RockPro64, which runs my home server now.

But I have used raspberry pi’s for several things, including:

  • Web server
  • NFS server
  • Torrent seedbox
  • Repository mirror
  • Home Assistant
  • Media Streaming server
1 Like

I bought a Raspberry Pi a few years ago so it could be the focal point of all my ideas about how I might use a Raspberry Pi.

3 Likes

One day I hope to acquire a PineBook Pro so that I may also use it as the focal point of all my ideas about how I might use a PineBook Pro.

2 Likes

@Ulfnic, @friardest, it seems we have the problem of finding a solution first (the hardware), then a problem second (the use case).

I caught myself hoarding a couple of unused Raspberry Pi 3’s last summer, with no use case, so I showed them off to a nephew and nephew-in law (grade 4, 9 years old), showing them “Blade Buster” in RetroPi, watching a video file in Kodi, and Raspbian (and how it could surf Youtube). Then I asked if I gave the RPis to them (fully accessorized), would they actually use them? They were very stoked, yes!

So when allowed to play with the Raspberry Pis themselves, what did they prefer to do? There is a website, Friv, which has some free, in-browser games, keyboard controlled. Chromium could play all of them, and I had htop running in a window beside, the CPU just barely keeping up.

They sat side by side, all 4 of their hands on the Logitech wireless keyboard, playing 2-player co-operative games. No need to go ROM-hunting.

So yah, friv is great to entertain some idle kids, on an old Raspberry Pi 3 or 4. No joysticks needed for many of the games!

4 Likes

A racing game without brakes, sign me up!

1

1 Like

I’ve always found uses for mine quickly and they just stay working, ha.

So I’m running pihole on a 2. The 3b is connected to an external drive I send media to and serves it up to all the firesticks. And finally my 4b is running my docker containers. Subsonic, Nextcloud, a repository mirror and a proxy server.

I’m trying to get Mattermost to run on a RPi4, using Ubuntu 18.04.4. I can install Mattermost just fine in a VM, but getting it to work on an RPi 4 presents a particularly hard challenge:

Neither Ubuntu 18.04.4, nor 19.10 include nmcli (from the “network-manager” package), in a stock image. Without it, good luck configuring wifi on the CLI! They don’t include the package “net-tools” by default either. Aargh! (Note: Raspbian does include net-tools by default. Raspbian also allows easy headless setup by touching the file “ssh” in the boot partition, and plunking in a simple wpa_supplicant.conf file there as well, see here).

Dear @popey, I have a suggestion for the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 images for the Raspberry Pi 4. Please oh please, could the packages “network-manager” and maybe even “net-tools” (since Raspbian includes it, and no security nightmares ensue), be included in the stock images? Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi 4 is way harder to set up with wifi, than is Raspbian, at present!!

The ease of use for headless setup with the “ssh”, and “wpa_supplicant.conf” files included in the boot partition are also super convenient and awesome in Raspbian. Could those also “just work” please, as with Raspbian?

If there is somewhere specific to file these sort of ARM-related feature requests, I would appreciate knowing it.

Does anyone use a PiHole to block their smart TV’s from sending info back to the vendors? (screenshots of your content to samsung) Does anyone have experience with using a PiHole on smart device?

Blocked tons callbavks from echo devices qnd firesticks, the only issue Ive ever ran into is Hulu, blocking the ad server breaks the stream

1 Like

The Raspberry Pi 4B (w/ 4GB of RAM) has both the horsepower and the RAM to serve a decent number of clients (like a family, or a medium-sized team), using Mattermost Team server. Other OSS chat forum/messaging servers (like Zulip, and Discourse) are too heavyweight for the Raspberry Pi 4, by contrast.

I was able to set up my Raspberry Pi 4 as a useful push-notification-cabable chat server (where the end user experience is actually likeable), with nice Desktop clients, and smartphone clients, with nice notifications.

Mattermost on ARM is very unsupported, from the official Mattermost project. But I eventually found this, which was a bit outdated, but worked great on my Raspberry Pi 4!

Other notes:

Mattermost blows away Nextcloud Talk, when it comes to the end-user experience, when text chatting. It has many convenient, user friendly features that Nextcloud Talk doesn’t have. Like uploading attachments. And newly-taken photos. And videos. And reactions. And flagging. And Pinning. And editing old comments. etc. etc.

Nextcloud Talk does run on the Raspberry Pi 4, granted you install it by hand. Yes, there is a snap (for the Raspberry Pi, running Raspbian 32-bit), but apps such as Nextcloud Talk won’t work in the snap, at present. The snap will generate “ld.so”-related error messages in /var/log/syslog, and there will be vague errors in the GUI, which block the functionality. Yes, there is an ARM64 docker image of Nextcloud, but at present I trust Raspbian way more than I trust 64-bit Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi 4.

I say Nextcloud Talk is a Nextcloud app that is not worth your time even trying out. You can do much, much better.

As soon as you move from ARM up to AMD64, then you might as well install, say, DIscourse, not Mattermost (unless you really want push notifications, which the Mattermost App will provide granted you install it from their Google Play Store, and, BTW, you had better not try to use a self-signed SSL cert).

And Rocket.chat was disqualified from my consideration, as they are stingy with how many free push notifications they will let your server have per month, only 1000 (yes, don’t take those for granted). Both Mattermost Team server and Nextcloud Talk will allow infinite push notifications, at present, albeit the Mattermost push notifications suffer about a 10-second-delay, before coming through.

2 Likes